


Make It Anywhere

by Lady_Ganesh



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Birthday, Established Relationship, M/M, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2019-12-26 03:18:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18274697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh
Summary: It's Steve's birthday and Tony wants to celebrate, and Steve's got some things to show Tony, too.





	Make It Anywhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pyrrhical (anoyo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/gifts).



> Set between Avengers and Age of Ultron and a teensy bit AU as a result. Thanks to CaptainBlue for betaing!

Tony woke him up, which was unusual. The rare times he stayed over, Steve was the one cooking breakfast while Tony pulled the covers over his head and complained about the light coming in too early. But this time Tony was touching his shoulder, gentle. "Cap," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"Would you believe nothing, for once?" Tony's smile was a little wry. "We just need to get going. Busy day."

Steve's birthday. Either his twenty-third or his ninety-second, depending on how you kept score. Tony had dropped a hint about having plans but, in typical Tony fashion, hadn't given away anything more than that. "Did you make me breakfast?"

Tony shot him a look. "Would you believe me if I said I'd thought about it?"

After months working together and nearly a month of whatever it was they were doing, Steve had gotten pretty good at Tony's tells, the set of his mouth, the way his gaze shifted just a little. "Yeah," he said. "I'd believe it."

And there was another tell, the way Tony almost preened for a half-second before putting his Tony Face back on. "Well," he said. "I thought of something better. Go on, get dressed."

"If this involves a private helicopter--"

"No private helicopters are involved, Rogers, just get out of bed already."

"Fine, fine," he said, and swung his legs out of bed. "Do I have time for a shower?"

"You have--" Tony made an elaborate show of checking his watch--"Two minutes more than you usually take to get dressed and showered, so, you know. Luxuriate in that."

Steve saluted him, because he knew it got a little under Tony's skin, and did just that.

 

Breakfast wasn't the elaborate catered affair Steve had feared; instead Tony had put together something of a picnic on the roof, though a picnic with a weatherproof sunshade and a bunch of food Steve could barely recognize. "What's this one?" he said.

"Oh, that's Thai," Tony said. "They don't really do that much breakfast stuff, but I had that rice pudding ten years ago after the worst breakup of my life, and--" He paused. "Smooth, Stark, bring up your exes at birthday brunch."

"'S too early for brunch," Steve said, scooping a bunch of the white stuff onto his plate. "I should know, you woke me up."

"Funny, the man's funny." But that seemed to have broken Tony out of whatever negative path he'd been headed down, so Steve counted it as a win. "There's things I want you to see. My New York."

They'd talked, around more than about, the differences in the city since Steve went in the ice, since Tony was growing up. Too many rough subjects--all of Steve’s lost time, Tony’s difficult relationship with his father. It felt different to have it out in the open. "Sounds good," he said. "Fireworks, though, right? I always saw the fireworks when I was a kid."

"Oh you bet we're gonna have fireworks," Tony said, and he thought he was being funny, probably, because he wiggled his eyebrows.

"Well," Steve said. "I've got something to look forward to, then."

 

There was an African art and music festival in Commodore Barry Park, and that was the first place Tony's car stopped at. (Steve would've been fine with the subway, but Tony could draw a crowd in an empty field, and at least it wasn't a limo.) There were dancers, and more food, and a lot of art, contemporary and traditional, and damned if Tony didn't realize what spoke to Steve sometimes, because he led the way to a dark-skinned woman with graying braids, whose mixed media work absolutely blew him away.

"This--this use of color," he said. "You're astonishing."

"Thank you," she said. She had a bright fuchsia dress on, and a gold-colored skirt that somehow made both colors seem brighter in their contrast. 

"Ms. Bright’s come here since I was a kid," Tony said to Steve, as she turned to wait on another customer. "I remember--I was eight, and Dad was, I don't know, off somewhere, and Mom brought me here, let me just run around and do stuff. But I kept coming back to this one artist--"

"I was painting, then," she said, because she hadn’t stopped listening. “Did you want me to put that in a bag for you?”

"I begged and begged until she bought me something. Just a little painting, but I had it in my room until I went to college. Brought it to college with me, too."

Ms. Bright handed the young woman she’d been waiting on her bag. "You have a lovely day. And you--you flatter me, Mr. Stark."

"You still have it?" Steve asked.

"I do not," he said, a little wry. "Lost it in a breakup. She took my Cure albums and that painting. I never forgave her."

"Understandable," Steve said. "I don't think I would have."

"I like your friend," the woman told Tony.

"Yeah," Tony said. "I do too."

 

Lunch was at a little place in the Village, unfamiliar to both of them. "This was where the gay bars were, when I was a kid. I used to get off on the subway and just...people-watch, I guess. Think about what it might be like to be in the bars. Talking to a drag queen. I was young enough I didn't really think about sex. It was more...what could be, you know?" He looked out the window, and his face was shadowed. "People...I didn't realize people were getting sick--they _weren't_ getting sick until I was older. And then...things got different then. Dangerous. And not the fun kind of dangerous."

Steve remembered when dangerous had still felt thrilling. That seemed like a lot more than eighty years ago. "You know what? I think it's my turn."

"Oh," Tony said. "You do?"

He grinned. "You done? Because I think you need to see a little of _my_ New York now."

"Brooklyn, huh?" Tony muttered, and Steve wasn't sure if he thought Steve would hear it or not, but it didn't matter, because they were starting in Auburndale.

 

"Queens, Rogers? I’m doubting your loyalties."

"Auburndale Art School," Steve said, pointing out the building. "It's a magnet school now. Visual and performing arts. Come on, I want to show you something."

"Yeah, yeah," Tony said, but walked behind Steve easily enough, and though he raised an eyebrow when Audrey at the front desk waved him in, he didn't say anything. 

"They've redone a lot, of course," Steve said, as they walked through the main hallway. "But the kiln's in the same place, and they've got--" He looked through the glass window. No students. Perfect. "Come on."

The tile wall had actually been covered for a while in the sixties and seventies, or so Audrey had told him, but then some historians had realized it was there, with the work of not just young, hopeful Captain America, but some of the best artists the WPA had hired, back in the day, and a promising young postwar sculptor that Tony had in his own overpriced apartment.

Tony craned his neck to read the brass plaque. "Students from the late nineteen-twenties through the end of World War II were invited to be part of Miss Jenkins's ceramics wall... So where's yours?"

Steve pointed. He'd always been proud of that piece, a red, yellow and blue pattern of stars that repeated off the edge. Miss Jenkins had teased him that not all art had to be so functional, but he liked the thought of a whole wall or floor bearing his mark.

Back when he thought he'd change the world through his art. 

"It's pretty," Tony said.

"Pretty. My life's work there, and all you've got to say is 'pretty.'"

"I was busy wondering if you'd pulled Phoebe Cartwright's pigtails."

"We were a little past pigtail pulling. Besides, she was after my time."

"I met her once, at her last solo show. I was, damn, maybe thirteen? And she retired to New Mexico. I still think boredom's what killed her."

"I was in class with James Reed, though. The black and midnight blue one near the top." He pointed. James had died in the eighties. Car accident. "You've got one of his."

"So I do," Tony said, looking up. "So I do. You kept good company back then."

"He was kind of a prick, if you want to know the truth."

"I am thrilled at the prospect of learning your art school gossip." Tony took his arm. "Tell me all of it."

 

He showed Tony the new tiles out front, an ongoing project by the current students, in colors he wouldn't have dreamed of using back in the day--wouldn't even have had access to. Their dreams and visions were so different. "They're a great group of kids," he said.

"How many times have you visited?"

Steve shrugged; no sense in denying it. "Not that many. Mostly I follow them on Instagram."

"Very twenty-first century of you."

"Gotta move with the times, right?"

"We do," Tony said, and took his arm. "Can I get the next one? I did have plans."

"If you insist," Steve said, without heat. 

 

"This used to be an arcade," Tony said, gesturing at a Starbucks. "Video games, in big consoles. I'd come in with a roll of quarters and stay as long as I could. Sometimes when I was on a roll, they'd kick me out at closing time."

"How often was that?"

"Less often than you might think," he said. "Usually if you lost you had to start the whole game over again from scratch. Took a lot of quarters."

"They have a Pac-Man machine in a diner not that far from my apartment," Steve said. "You don't have to put any quarters in it at all."

"See, hipsters ruined video games," Tony said. "Now you can just go right up to the game and play. No quarters, no tokens, start again whenever you want to. No work ethic needed at all."

"I see," Steve said, and Tony certainly knew that Steve was indulging him, but he didn't seem to mind.

 

Tony's high school was no longer standing; they'd torn the building down ("Seventies monstrosity," he'd said once, "you think my tower's ugly, you have no idea") and put up an urgent care clinic. What was still standing was an old garage with a half-dozen guys in grease-stained coveralls, working on motorcycles. Not one of them was under forty. Most of the motorcycles weren't much younger. One of them was--

"I think my boss at the factory had that model Indian," Steve said. "Maybe that exact Indian."

A tall, lanky Hispanic man, his dark hair shot with gray, grinned at him. "You like it? They found it in a barn out in Fayetteville, near Syracuse. I don't think anybody had started it for thirty years. Had to rebuild the whole engine. Basket on the back's custom, we had to pay a kid to mill a new mount for it. Thought I would have to pay a basketweaver, by the time I was finished. But we're almost done."

The finish was a ruby red, the kind of paint that looked like it had hidden depths, and the chrome was polished to a perfect shine. "It's beautiful," Steve said.

"I thought that one would catch your eye," Tony said. "Told him it was your birthday today, and he said you could take it for a spin, if you want."

"Oh," Steve said. "I couldn't--"

Tony clapped him on the shoulder. "You could. Don't disappoint Isador here, I made him find you a helmet and everything."

Isador grinned. "He said you were by the book, so I had to have one that was up to date."

"Oh," Steve said. "Oh, I see how this is."

One of the other guys (stocky, red-faced, military cut) tossed him a helmet. It was good quality, and Steve could already tell it would fit. "Come on," he said. "No one wants to say they got turned down by Captain America."

"You got me there," he said. He had always wanted to know what that bike could do.

 

"I wanted to buy it for you," Tony said, on the way back. "But...I knew you wouldn't go for that."

"I wouldn't have," Steve said, because he could buy his own things, thank you very much; breakfast was one thing, a motorcycle quite another. But he'd talked Tony into riding with him, holding his waist, laughing a little when anyone gave the bike a double-take. They'd almost run up against a parade, and Steve had needed to remember the best way to get back without getting stuck in a one-way street. Tony had laughed against his back. It'd been good.

They'd watched the rest of th parade after Steve had brought the bike back, cheering the little kids who were clearly thrilled to be the center of attention, trying to make sure the little pigtailed girl near them got a full allotment of candy. Tony would wave so hard he almost hit Steve in the head; Steve settled for whistling. There was a little good-natured ribbing over whose method was more effective, but in the end, the girl had a plastic shopping bag overflowing with gum and Smarties and little plastic toys, and everyone seemed happy.

"What did you plan for dinner?" Steve said, when they were back at Tony's, a little sunburned but nothing that wouldn't be healed in the morning.

"Believe it or not, I didn't plan that far out," Tony said, grabbing a glass and filling it with water from the fancy filter on his refrigerator door. "I thought you would've bailed on me by now."

He'd been kind of cynical, the days leading up to this. Might've been a logical conclusion to make. "Well," he said, because he was too proud to concede the point, "I haven't."

For half a second, he caught Tony's eyes, and they were unguarded, vulnerable. "So," Tony said, "If you want to--"

"I'm not that hungry yet," Steve said. "We could just put something together later."

"That would work." Tony drained his glass, and Steve watched his throat work. 

He took the empty glass from Tony's hand, stepping closer, putting it down on the counter behind Tony so his arm would reach past, and smiled down at him. "For now...I believe I was promised fireworks, Mr. Stark. And I'm not sure I feel like waiting until it gets dark."

"Well," Tony said, and his eyes flashed fire. "I'm sure we can think of something."


End file.
